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Tag: Popup Window

One of my less-commendable habits, is to add plugins to my WordPress blog, which might not be necessary, but which might OTOH be useful after all.

There is now a button at the bottom, left-hand side of my postings, which has a little printer icon, which my readers can click, in order to obtain a printable version of my postings.

There was an earlier point in time, when I took this plugin to be potential malware, because its presence in the browser causes scripts to run from other domains, and I did not think it wise, to be inviting scripts to run as part of my blog, which I do not know the purpose of, and which exist, because the Web-site of a plugin, includes another Web-site I know nothing about, which runs a script. So at that time, I went into high alert for no other reason, installed a whole security suite named “WordFence”, and removed the “PrintFriendly” plugin from my site.

Since then, my confidence in the security of my own site has improved – in spite of the fact that I’m still installing plugins – and I’ve come to think that my reaction back then might have been a bit unscientific. After all, even though I could know for certain that this unidentified script was being loaded onto my browser – which subsequently blocked it – I had no sure way of knowing it contained malware. The script in question may simply have had as purpose, to provide some sort of funding to the site that hosts PrintFriendly.

If the reader clicks on this icon, he’ll see that a floating window pops up, from which he can choose how – or if – he wants to print my posting. That floating window will only appear, if the reader allows his browser to run scripts from ‘printfriendly.com’. That floating window is still hosted on the other party’s server – belonging to PrintFreindly and not to me – and because that floating window is being hosted on their server, it also represents a resource which they need to pay for in some way, even though I’m not paying them.

Now, WordFence has a feature (enabled on my blog), that is called a ‘Front-Side URL Scan’. In short, instead of only scanning my plugin folders for trouble, this feature examines all the URLs which the home-page of my blog sends to the would-be browsers, and compares those URLs to blacklists of known malware. I will next be able to see, whether the URL in question was actually blacklisted – by anybody other than me. If it was, this plugin will disappear again from my blog.